Armed with chainsaws and other heavy-duty equipment, hundreds of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—some traveling from as far as Salt Lake City—are mobilizing to clean up a long-neglected Jewish cemetery in Queens later this month.
The four-day effort at Bayside Cemetery, which is owned by Congregation Shaare Zedek on the Upper West Side, is being organized by Shane Wamsley, a church member who says he was spurred to action after reading on the Internet a Jewish Week expose of conditions at the Ozone Park cemetery and receiving a message from the “spirit of God.”
Wamsley, 45, is activity chair of the Utah chapter of the International Jewish Genealogical Society, and says he feels both a religious and sentimental attachment to the Jewish people, in part because his late wife, Soozi, who died a year and a half ago, was born Jewish.
“In the Bible we’re told of the Samaritan man who on his road to Jericho stopped to do good works,” Wamsley said. “Would these works in Ozone Park not be acceptable in the eyes of our Lord?”
In the past, Jews have clashed with church members, popularly known as Mormons, for their policy of posthumously baptizing Jews, particularly Holocaust victims. However, relations have improved considerably since 1995, when the church ordered its members to stop such baptisms for all Jews who were not relatives or ancestors of church members.
Assured that posthumous baptism was not on Wamsley’s agenda, Shaare Zedek president Daniel Werlin is welcoming the Mormons’ assistance at the troubled cemetery. The 230-member Conservative synagogue currently has no rabbi, although it is searching for one and hopes to hire someone in the near future.
“I think it’s really wonderful that Shane and his colleagues are interested in helping out the cemetery, in helping to restore it to a more acceptable condition, and that we’ll all be able to be working together in this laudable goal,” Werlin said.
Established in the 1840s, Bayside Cemetery is the final resting place for approximately 35,000 Jews. It is located in a working- to middle-class section of Queens, almost an hour’s subway ride away from the increasingly gentrified section of the Upper West Side that is home to Shaare Zedek’s predominantly 20- and 30-something membership, many of them rabbinical students and young professionals.
The cemetery has long been plagued by vandals and overgrown weeds. Many of the headstones, even in areas designated for perpetual care, have fallen over and not been repaired. In January, a vandal broke into one of the mausoleums and opened the graves, exposing human remains.
Citing the lack of revenues from new grave sales (the cemetery is at its capacity) and an inadequate cemetery budget, Shaare Zedek officials have said they lack the resources to properly maintain Bayside. It is unclear whether the inadequate funds stem from poor fiscal management over the years or diversion of funds to the synagogue decades ago, when it was struggling financially.
The synagogue has claimed the cemetery should be the responsibility of the broader Jewish community, yet its leaders have been unable to garner significant help from other Jewish institutions.
But if the Jewish community has been slow to come to Bayside Cemetery’s aid, not so the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Working with Jose Cordova, the local district president for the church, Wamsley quickly mobilized some 400 volunteers, many of them from low-income neighborhoods such as East New York and Bushwick in Brooklyn and Jamaica, Queens.
Cordova, who is conducting a detailed needs-assessment in preparation for the cleanup, is focusing his recruitment efforts on church members with landscaping experience.
“It’s such an amazing thing when you’re in a cemetery and know people there can’t help themselves anymore and that you can contribute something, can help to make a beautiful place for them to stay,” Cordova said.
But why a Jewish cemetery?
“It’s like a bond I feel we have with the Jewish people,” Cordova said. “We have many of the same traditions and 80 to 90 percent the same beliefs.”
Wamsley, who says he hopes Jews will participate as well, notes that the effort is a way for “cousins” to “work side by side, by which I mean the tribe of the house of Judah working with the tribe of the house of Joseph.”
In addition to the intensive cleanup effort, Wamsley says he hopes eventually to develop a topographical map of the cemetery and database of all the graves, both of which he will provide to Shaare Zedek. He has also enlisted Daniel Rona of the Utah-based Ensign Foundation to help repair the cemetery’s damaged mausoleums.
“The basic mission of the Ensign Foundation is to bring Mormons and Jews together in all kinds of projects—academic and cultural,” Rona said, adding that church members “feel that they are the tribes of Israel” and that “even though there is an obvious doctrinal religious difference, culturally the two are very close to each other.”
Rona, who also operates a tour company that brings Mormons to visit Israel, plans to run Jewish educational sessions for church members while he is in town for the cleanup.
The Mormons are not the only non-Jews who have taken an interest in Bayside Cemetery recently. This spring, City Councilman Joseph Addabbo, who lives just blocks from Bayside Cemetery, offered to help. Addabbo has mobilized Ralph and Leslie Francisco, local funeral home owners, who are in turn recruiting funeral providers to assist with mausoleum and tombstone repair.
Shaare Zedek’s Werlin is hoping the new efforts will provide the needed jump-start to bring the cemetery to a condition in which its small staff, aided by occasional synagogue cleanup efforts, can manage ongoing maintenance.
This summer, the synagogue is planning several volunteer cleanup days for the first time in more than a year, and the regional chapter of the Conservative movement’s United Synagogue Youth has also pledged to organize members for several cleanup days.
“It’s certainly very impressive that someone identified the project and broadcast it to his religious community,” Werlin said, “and there appear to be hundreds of willing hands to take part in a project that will not benefit them in any way except to do a good deed, whereas you would think in the Jewish community it would cut closer to home.
“Maybe when people see the selfless nature of this act, other local people more closely tied to the Jewish community will be inspired to help out,” he said.
While grateful for the flurry of new interest in Bayside Cemetery, Werlin acknowledges when asked that he was initially somewhat apprehensive about the church’s involvement.
“You don’t generally get calls from people in Utah interested in volunteering for something in Queens,” he said.
After speaking to Wamsley, Werlin consulted with Rabbi Frederick Wenger of Congregation Kol Ami in Salt Lake City, whose cemetery has also benefited from Wamsley’s voluntarism. Rabbi Wenger “vouched for Shane’s sincerity,” Werlin said.
“In my conversations with Shane as well, [posthumous baptism] has been explicitly discussed that it’s a concern that some people have or might have and he’s certainly been understanding,” Werlin said. “His understanding of the project, as is mine, is that we’re going to clean up the cemetery and that’s it.”
Asked by The Jewish Week, Wamsley insists that “there’s not going to be a crossing of lines,” adding that “it’s totally not allowed.”
Kim Farah, a spokeswoman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints headquarters in Salt Lake City, emphasized that since 1995, church members can do “proxy baptisms” only for their ancestors.
“We believe our families are eternal, so the greatest blessing for someone of the Mormon faith is to be able to live with their families eternally after they’ve passed on,” Farah said, noting that this is the reason for the church’s legendary interest in genealogical research.
According to Farah, a posthumous baptism does not make the deceased person a member of the church but “merely offers them the opportunity to accept or reject it.”
Calling Wamsley’s efforts “very nice,” Joel Levy, New York regional director for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), said he was initially concerned upon hearing of the cemetery project, but was put at ease after ADL staff contacted Wamsley and Shaare Zedek officials.
The project “is being done completely above board and not with the intention of posthumous baptism,” Levy said, adding: “I accept at face value that there is good intention, that the issues have been aired and that this is not something we should be concerned about.”
In general, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Levy said, has been “very much sensitized to the fact that [posthumous baptism of Jews] is unacceptable and they seem to have changed their behavior.”
Howard Fried, who has long sparred with Shaare Zedek over its maintenance of Bayside Cemetery — particularly the section owned by his group, the Chechonover Society — says the church’s involvement is “spectacular” and an act of “brotherhood.”
“I guess I feel sorry or ashamed why the Jewish people couldn’t somehow or some way over the years get together and do that, that we had to rely on the assistance of another religion,” Fried said.
However, he added, “I’m very pleased,” noting that, “After this place is clean the souls are going to look down and be so happy that finally they got the respect they deserve.”
The cleanup effort at Bayside Cemetery (80-35 Pitkin Ave.) is scheduled for May 28-30 and June 2, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Volunteers will be required to sign a waiver of responsibility before entering the cemetery. For more information, e-mail Shane Wamsley at mybershet@comcast.net or call (801) 446-9092.
